


because I could not stop for Death

by anthologia



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Gen, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 02:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/874505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthologia/pseuds/anthologia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Arthur killed Cobb in a dream, and one time he killed her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	because I could not stop for Death

_prelude._  
  
“Because I could not stop for Death,  
He kindly stopped for me.”  
  
  
 _one._  
  
The first time she kills Cobb in a dream, the mark had clued in and smashed his fingers to a mangled wreck under a viciously heavy antique paperweight. Arthur could hear the screaming from two floors away.  
  
Her first bullet strays off-course slightly, doesn’t quite hit its mark. Dom’s pained cry echoes in her ears over and over again as she – tight-lipped and face bloodless – empties half a clip into his chest, then one more for luck, to make it stick. The last thing she remembers before the subconscious projections converge on her is his face, frozen in a grotesque mask of pain.  
  
Her hands shook. She vows to never let it happen again.  
  
  
 _two._  
  
The second time she kills him, they’re half-submerged in icy water, caught by the slow fall into hypothermia. Her limbs are starting to numb, bit by bit, into the false warmth that comes with her body temperature plummeting. Cobb is shaking, blood streaming from a wound in his head where their mark got in a solid hit before shoving them overboard off his yacht.  
  
“It’s over, isn’t it,” she says, and it’s not a question. Cobb laughs a little shakily, and that’s all the confirmation she needs.  
  
They say when you’re rescuing a drowning person, you should take extra care because they’ll flail and panic and pull their rescuer under with them. She shoves his head beneath the surface, counts the seconds silently before his body slacks and she can let go. He doesn’t fight.  
  
She’s not sure how long she stays there, treading water, keeping her projection of his lifeless body company, before he delivers the kick in the real world that pulls her out of sleep. It feels like years.  
  
  
 _three._  
  
In the waking world, Arthur wears her hair up in tidy buns, twists and curls and French braids with never so much as a hair out of place. In the real world, she holds them together with tortoiseshell clasps, silk ties, elegant silver pins. In dreaming, she laces it with weapons – poisoned capsules tucked into the layers of her hair, sticks with sharpened ends that could take out an eye. Whenever a job goes wrong, she can always be counted on to have a backup plan tucked away in her flawlessly crafted dream-façade, like some ethereal angel of destruction.  
  
He’s already dying, excruciatingly slow. A knife in his guts spilling his blood out onto the beige flooring of the room they’re locked in; the contrast is almost obscene.  
  
She only has one capsule.  
  
Arthur waits for the kick that almost never comes. For hours she sits there, and his body loses all its residual heat, even with her curled up over him, hands fisted in his shirt and head on his chest. By the time she wakes up, her skin’s soaked through and stained from his blood and she’s been crying for almost a half-hour from the fear that this one is real, that he really did die and he’s never coming back.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says, before she can even form a word, before her eyes are even all the way open. “They caught us.” They’re surrounded by unconscious bodies, people with guns and grudges. She nods once, stiffly, and sits up. The only concession she allows is the way her hand grips his too tightly as he pulls her to her feet and they run off into safety.  
  
  
 _interlude._  
  
The first time she killed him, Mal was still with them. Mal, lovely Mal, who found Arthur curled in on herself by a toilet, letting loose something that might have been dry heaves or just silent, heaving sobs. She brushed Arthur’s hair away from her face and bound it up in a tortoiseshell clip, and held her until she stopped shaking.  
  
“Don’t tell Cobb,” Arthur whispered, and Mal had nodded and shushed her as gently as she would a child.  
  
She never told Cobb.  
  
  
 _four._  
  
She stabs a stiletto heel through his throat and stares down at him for a full minute, thinking how surreal it is that two people whose job it is to work together and watch each others’ backs spent so much of their lives murdering each other.  
  
And then she takes the other stiletto and slits her wrists. It’s not nearly as quick or tidy, but it does the trick.  
  
  
 _five._  
  
There are many ways to kill a man, and Arthur feels like she’s tried all of them. Snapping the spinal cord, gunshot to the head, poison, stabbing. She tries not to think about how many times she’s done it to friends, coworkers. Cobb. They say you stop dreaming on your own, after long enough. Arthur can’t wait for the day she stops seeing him die, over and over again in dreams private and shared.  
  
“Do it,” he says to her, and she pulls the trigger, unnaturally fast. Her hand doesn’t falter.  
  
It never does, these days.  
  
  
  
 _postlude._  
  
The first time Cobb kills her in a dream, the mark had wrenched her arm out of its socket. She has broken ribs – several of them, she lost count after three – and all she knows is it _hurts_ and she’s almost surprised at how much, how real. Pain is in the mind, but until that moment she didn’t realize _just_ how true that is.  
  
His bullet strikes true, embeds itself in her skull. She only has a moment to register what’s happening, look him in the eyes as he pulls the trigger.  
  
His hand shakes.


End file.
